Connect Your SIP Instance
An administrator registers once, from inside SIP. Work through Prerequisites first. Two problems stop most registrations: a firewall that was never opened, and a license that no longer matches FireMon User Center.
Register
- In Administration, open Settings > Insights from the toolbar.
- Click Register.
- Read the Insights registration terms and, if you agree, click Register again to confirm.
The Registration Details section fills in when it succeeds:
| Field | What it is |
|---|---|
| Client ID | Your FireMon SaaS client, which is also your FireMon User Center account customer ID |
| Registration Date | When registration completed |
| Installed Insight Plugin | The plugin version running on this instance, with its checksum |
| Available Remote Insight Plugin | The version and checksum of a remote plugin, when one is available. Install retrieves it from FireMon Cloud and replaces any existing version. |
Insights also appears in the module menu on the toolbar from here on, which is how your users reach it. See Signing In.
What registration does
Registration has three effects, and you only see the first.
It creates your Insights client. One dedicated FireMon SaaS client, keyed to your FireMon Customer ID, which is the same identifier as your User Center account. Everything Insights stores for you hangs off it.
It exchanges keys. Your SIP sends a public key and gets one back, and each side keeps its own private key. From then on, the two authenticate each other with those keys instead of your license. Your SIP uses them to get the short-lived API key it presents on every call to Insights. You never create or handle that key yourself. API Keys covers what the key authorizes, and how to revoke one.
It starts the collection. From then on, Insights queries your SIP once a day over the connection the plugin holds open, and stores what it measures. Insights sets that schedule, and SIP has no setting for it.
One connected instance per customer ID
You can have one active connected SIP instance per company ID. If you tried Insights on a lab server and now want production connected under the same license, or under an evaluation license tied to the same User Center account, unregister the lab first.
- On the lab server, go to Administration > Settings > Insights.
- Click Unregister, then confirm.
Unregistering revokes the API keys that instance was holding, and stops Insights collecting from it. Your policy data in SIP is untouched.
Then register production the same way. The old keys are gone, so that registration is authenticated by your license instead. Install the current license from FireMon User Center on the production server before you start. If the license is out of date, registration is refused, and the error tells you to reinstall it.
Restored copies
The negotiated keys live in the SIP database, so they survive a backup and restore, including a data-only restore. A copy of a registered production instance brought up on another machine holds valid credentials. Insights will collect from it under the same client, and mix its numbers into yours. That behavior is there for disaster recovery, and it causes problems with a lab clone.
Don't fix it by pressing Unregister on the clone. Unregistering revokes the keys for the whole client, which takes production down with it. Raise it with FireMon Support instead.
Confirming it worked
On the SIP side, Registration Details is populated and Insights is in the module menu. On the Insights side, sign in and open the KPI page.
Insights collects once a day, so the first full set of numbers arrives within a day of registering. You won't see everything at once:
- Some metrics can be recalculated from history your SIP already holds. Those are backfilled on the first collection — a value for each of the last 14 days, each of the last 11 months and each of the last 5 years — so those trends start with a shape rather than a single point.
- Everything else starts from the day you registered, and builds up daily from there.
- The longer trend ranges unlock on the age of your registration, not on how much history you have. Finding Your Way Around explains when each one opens up.
If a day passes and the pages are still empty, Troubleshooting covers what to check.